Africa’s AU: A Tool of Western Rule

by Thomas C. Mountain. May 7, 2012

The African Union (AU) has mutated into a
particularly corrupt and brutal enforcer of western rule in Africa. When it
comes to the interests of Pax Americana, you must start with the crimes
committed in the AU’s “War on Terror” in Somalia, a.k.a., the War on the Somali
people.
In 2006, the Somalis themselves under the
umbrella of the Union of Islamic Courts brought about a miracle in many
observers’ eyes and established a functioning government in the former capital
of Mogadishu, bringing peace and security to the region for the first time in
15 years.
The diktats of Pax Americana’s International War
on Terror require that any truly popular government, especially with the word
Islamic in its name, must not be, and the USA soon dispatched its Ethiopian
gendarmes to put fire and sword to peace in Somalia.
This was all done with the official blessing and
support of the AU and its big brothers in the UN. Unfortunately for them, the
brutal nature of the Ethiopian invasion and occupation began a massive upswell
of Somali nationalism and the gendarmes from Addis Ababa were forced to flee
the land of their historic enemies, for no Ethiopian leader in their right mind
had ever picked a fight with the Somalis.
Up stepped the AU in the form of what is today
over 20,000 heavily armed soldiers, mainly some 15,000 from Uganda. These
mercenaries invaded Somalia in 2008 and quickly turned Mogadishu into a high
explosive inferno, destroying much of the city, 30 square miles or so and
creating half a million refugees on top of the half a million Ethiopia had
already caused.
The AU troops prefer heavy artillery, tanks,
heavy armored vehicles and helicopter gunships when dealing with the Somali
resistance. The AU has had no qualms about shelling Somali neighborhoods and
markets and the monthly lists of dead and wounded residents of Mogadishu
swelled into the thousands before the Al Shabab resistance finally withdrew
from the city.
And all the while no one seems to ask why? What
gives the Ugandan army the right to be fighting a war against Somalis? How does
the AU get away with massacring tens of thousands of the Somali people? Or
creating a million refugees who are left to slow starvation in the long
overflowing refugee camps?
To understand how this has come to be, how a
lofty sounding Organization for African Unity became the African Union and
started killing tens of thousands of Africans, one must go back to the
miscarriage that brought this organization into existence.
In the early 1960’s, and the birth of what
quickly became Neocolonialism in Africa, the Organization for African Unity
(OAU) was born. Despite all the idealist rhetoric of building a truly
Pan-African union, the very birth of the organization took place amidst a
contradiction so overwhelming that all good intent was stillborn.
Instead of supporting African Liberation, the OAU
located its headquarters in Ethiopia which was already involved in a
counterinsurgency against the Eritrean Liberation Front, the independence
movement that became the forefather of today’s Government of Eritrea.
After World War II, Ethiopia had colonized
Eritrea, with the blessing of the USA, instead of Eritrea getting its
independence like the rest of Africa.
A supposedly anti-colonial organization, the OAU,
with its headquarters in Ethiopia, a country colonizing another African
country?
This was a complete abandonment of any principle
and doomed all further prospects for the OAU to help the African people.
As such, matters have been pretty much all
downhill ever since. The OAU morphed into the AU as neocolonialism completed
its complete sweep of the newly “independent” African nations. Except one, that
is: Eritrea, and it wasn’t liberated until 1991.
For the first three decades of its existence the
OAU/AU stood by and let the Eritrean people fight their own battles, come USA
or Soviet Union interference. And for the first three decades of its existence,
the OAU/AU gave open support for the Ethiopian colonial regime occupying
Eritrea.
Again, things have only gotten worse since 1991
and Eritrean independence.
Now one must not forget that only one country in
Africa is led by a government that came to power by the military defeat and
expulsion of their colonizers. Many African independence movements picked up
the gun and fought their colonizers at some point, some for many years. But
only one actually defeated their colonizers on the field of battle and took
power not by negotiation and elections but via the barrel of a gun.
And that country is Eritrea, which today stands
as the only African voice in opposition to the crimes of the AU in Africa.
Today, the AU is in the midst of its latest
“surge” in Somalia and just as the USA did in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is increasing
its occupation army in size and just as in Iraq and Afghanistan, insisting it
is “winning the war on terror” in Somalia.
And just as Pax Americana has had to do in Iraq
and Afghanistan, the AU and its African mercenaries will inevitably one day
have to admit defeat and leave Somalia for history has shown no one can defeat
an entire people. Though not before causing untold suffering to the Somali
people and exposing the AU as the tool of western rule in Africa.

Thomas C. Mountain is the most widely distributed independent western
journalist in Africa, living and reporting from Eritrea since 2006. He can be
reached at thomascmountain@yahoo. com.